The Doctor and the Daleks

The Last Great Time War (often called simply the Time War) was the war between the Time Lords and the Daleks, which destroyed Gallifrey and Skaro leaving few survivors. The Doctor also referred to this conflict as "the last great Time War," implying that there had been others, but it is also implied in various media that all traces of the several earlier Time Wars have been removed from history.

 

While often alluded to, the events and progression of the Last Great Time War have never been fully explained. Short comments in various episodes act as hints, but the war was not thoroughly talked about until "The Sound of Drums". The second part of the episode The End of Time shows the Time Lord Council on the final day of the Time War, discussing the imminent destruction of Gallifrey and the Daleks by the Doctor. Their final strategy for survival is the destruction of all time and creation itself, and their transformation into pure consciousness; it was this strategy that the Doctor sought to avoid by ending the Time War as he did.

 

Image: The Doctor's Home Planet

Origins of the Time War

The precise facts of the Time War are mostly a mystery, but its origins are slightly more clear. At one point, the Time Lords predicted that in one possible timeline, the Daleks would "destroy all other life forms and make themselves the dominant creature in the universe." The Time Lord Ferrain sent the Doctor on a mission to Skaro during the Thousand Year War with certain objectives:

• If possible, to avert the creation of the Daleks
• Otherwise to alter their development and make them less aggressive
• Find some intrinsic flaw or weakness to exploit in the Daleks

The Doctor believed he managed only to, perhaps, set back the history of the Daleks for a thousand years. (DW: Genesis of the Daleks)

The Daleks eventually learned of what the Time Lords tried to do, and planned to infiltrate the High Council of the Time Lords with duplicates. (DW: Resurrection of the Daleks) One of the Dalek Puppet Emperors opened declaration of hostilities; although the Daleks claimed that these were merely in retaliation for the Time Lords sending the Doctor back in time to prevent their creation.

Later, the Doctor used the Hand of Omega to apparently destroy the Dalek homeworld of Skaro at some point in its history (DW: Remembrance of the Daleks), although he later learned that he may have destroyed a decoy instead (EDA: War of the Daleks).

 

The End of Time ultimately revealed that Rassilon himself, founder of the Time Lord Society and co-creator of the civilization's time travel technology, returned from the apparent grave to lead his people as the Time Lord President. The horrors of war had apparently hardened the Time Lords, who give near-unanimous support for this plan, with the exception of one whom Rassilon kills during a council session, and two (whom Rassilon referred to somewhat derisively as "weeping angels") who vote against it, one of whom is a woman, and the other whose identity remains unknown.

 

This mad scheme would ultimately attract the attention of the Doctor himself, who by this point had discovered a way to end the war, implied during The End of Time to be something known as "the Moment". It is unclear if he could simply have used this to destroy the Daleks but chose to destroy the Time Lords as well to prevent their plan from being implemented, or if using "the Moment" would always have resulted in the destruction of both antagonists together. By this point, the entire period of war had become "time locked" (meaning no time travel was allowed in or out) due to excessive use of temporal warfare, leading to Rassilon and his fellow councillors needing to discover a method of escaping the Lock as Gallifrey was attacked by its many enemies. In the end, they manipulated the Master by retroactively planting a four note drumbeat (the rhythm of a Time Lord's heartbeats) into his brain and used a Whitepoint Star, a diamond only found on Gallifrey, to create a link between the final hours of the Time War and present-day Earth, and therefore bring Gallifrey, the Time Lords, The Daleks, The Nightmare Child, The Skaro Degradation and other host of horrors laying siege to the planet, outside the Time Lock and into the present. The Doctor also says to The Master that in the last few days of the war, it practically turned into Hell. This plan ultimately failed though as the Doctor destroyed the diamond link, sending Rassilon and the Time Lords back to their apparent doom, with the Master seemingly sacrificing his life (his true fate remains unclear) to ensure Rassilon would not be able to get revenge upon the Doctor.

 

 

Aftermath

Despite speculation in some fan quarters, there is no real evidence that the Time Lords were erased from history due to the Time War. Indeed, races such as the Forest of Cheem and the Krillitanes know of both the War and the Time Lords, although they describe them as extinct. Similarly, although the Daleks are described as having "vanished out of time and space" by Jack Harkness in the first series two-part finale, they are still known as a legend by the future inhabitants of Earth, (knowledge of the existence of the Daleks also being shared by certain "select", current-day humans; such as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Sarah Jane Smith, Ian Chesterton, Barbara Wright, etc).

Why the Doctor does not encounter other time-travelling Time Lords or return to Gallifrey at a time before its destruction is not made explicit in the series although the use of the term "time locked" is suggestive. It has been stated in the past that there are locks on TARDISes that prevent travel into Gallifrey's past. The Doctor does run into a Time Lord from a different era other than his own, specifically his own fifth incarnation, in the mini-episode Time Crash, this may indicate that the Doctor's actions in ending the war retroactively wiped all other Time Lords from existence.

The destruction of the Time Lords creates a vacuum that may have left history itself more vulnerable to change. In The Unquiet Dead (2005), the Doctor tells Rose that time is in flux, and history can change instantly — a more fluid definition to that which had been seen in earlier stories, which had implied that history was either immutable (The Aztecs, 1964) or capable of being changed only by very powerful beings (Pyramids of Mars, 1975; Remembrance of the Daleks, 1988). In "The Christmas Invasion", the Doctor himself significantly alters history when he indirectly brings down the government of Harriet Jones, whom he originally predicted would be elected for three terms and become the architect of Britain's "Golden Age". In the episodes The Fires of Pompeii, The Shakespeare Code, The Unicorn and the Wasp and The Waters of Mars, the Doctor mentions that some points in time, such as the destruction of Pompeii, are fixed and unchangeable, while other events can be changed.

The most dramatic demonstration of this was in Father's Day (2005), when Rose creates a paradox by crossing her own timestream to save her father's life just before his destined death in a traffic accident. This summons the terrifying Reapers, who descended to "sterilise the wound" in time by devouring everything in sight. The Doctor states that if the Time Lords were still around, they could have prevented or repaired the paradox.

The consequences of creating a paradox are also why the Doctor cannot go back in time and save the Time Lords. Indeed, such actions may have directly contributed to their near-extinction: "They're all gone," the Ninth Doctor laments, "and now I'm going the same way." The Master's use of the retrofitted TARDIS as a paradox machine in The Sound of Drums (2007) demonstrates another possible implementation of a paradox, while in the episode Blink (2007) Billy Shipton states that the Tenth Doctor warned him that trying to alter his own timeline after having been sent into the past would "destroy two-thirds of the universe."

However unless the Doctor could return prior to the beginning of the Time War, which had the effect of changing the Time Lords "to the core" making them "more terrible" then any of the Doctor's other foes, it seems probable that even if the Doctor could save his people he would not. Indeed upon realising the Time Lords (from the end of the war) were on the verge of escaping the Time War he immediately picked up a revolver offered to him by Wilf which he had until then adamantly refused to ever accept.

In episode School Reunion (2006) The Doctor is tempted by the Skasis Paradigm, which would give him the ability to reorder the universe, and allow him to stop the war. In Rise of the Cybermen (2006) the Doctor notes that when the Time Lords were around, travel between parallel universes was less difficult, but with their demise, the paths between worlds are now closed.

Other races also suffered casualties. The Nestene consciousness lost its homeworld and its protein-source planets, and the Gelth lost their physical form and were reduced to gaseous beings.

The Time War also provides a convenient in-story explanation for any contradictions in series continuity: for example, writer Paul Cornell has suggested that Earth's destruction by an expanding sun in The End of the World five billion years hence, as opposed to the original depiction of its demise around the year 10,000,000 AD (The Ark, 1966) can be attributed to changes in history due to the War. Writer and future Doctor Who executive producer Steven Moffat has gone further, arguing that "a television series which embraces both the ideas of parallel universes and the concept of changing time can't have a continuity error — it's impossible for Doctor Who to get it wrong, because we can just say 'he changed time — it's a time ripple from the Time War'."

 

 

Survivors Of The War

Although the Doctor initially believes himself to be the last survivor of the Time War, in The Parting of the Ways (2005) he discovers that, in addition to the lone Dalek in Dalek, the Dalek Emperor itself had also survived, and had gone on to build a whole new Dalek race, using the organic material of Human cadavers by completely rewriting their DNA. The Doctor is convinced that he himself is the only surviving Time Lord, saying that he would know of any others (tapping his head: "In here") if they had. The destruction of the Emperor and his fleet at the conclusion of the 2005 series by a time vortex-augmented Rose Tyler is accompanied by her declaration that "the Time War ends."

In Doomsday (2006) it is revealed the elite Cult of Skaro survived by fleeing into the Void between dimensions and survived the original end of the Time War, taking with them the Genesis Ark, a Time Lord prison ship containing millions of Daleks. The new Dalek army released from the Ark is eventually sucked back into the Void, due to the actions of the Tenth Doctor, but the specially-equipped Cult of Skaro uses an "emergency temporal shift" to escape that fate. They reappear in New York, 1930 in Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks (2007); all but Dalek Caan are killed in the story, leaving Caan as the last known living Dalek. Caan uses another emergency temporal shift to escape after the other three are killed. Caan returns again in the episode The Stolen Earth (2008).

In the 2007 episode Gridlock (2007) the Face of Boe says that the Doctor is the "last of his kind," but goes on to say, cryptically, "You are not alone". This duality is explained in Utopia (2007) where it is revealed that the Master had managed to survive his race's extinction by hiding in human form at the end of the universe, similar to how the Doctor had hidden from the Family of Blood in Human Nature. The Master in his human form is known as Professor Yana, an acronym for the message the Face of Boe had given the Doctor before dying: "You are not alone". Both used a device known as the Chameleon Arch, which rewrites Time Lord DNA, changing the subject's species and giving them new memories, while storing the original biological configuration and consciousness in a fob-watch for safekeeping.

The 2008 episode The Stolen Earth revealed that Davros had been present in the Time War. The Doctor saw his ship destroyed. While the war was time-locked, Caan nonetheless managed to use his temporal shift to return to it and rescue Davros, at the cost of his sanity. Davros subsequently used cells from his body to create a new Dalek Empire, and maintains Caan close at his side because of the latter's apparent loyalty and his delphic ability to speak only the truth about the future.

 

• The Doctor survived. He stated that if any other Time Lords lived, he would have sensed their presence. (DW: Dalek) The Doctor's survival may have entailed a regeneration. Though he did not say so categorically, he implied unfamiliarity with his new face when he first met Rose Tyler; it's not known, however, how much time elapsed between the end of the war and his first meeting with Rose.

• The Master also survived, having used a Chameleon Arch to become the Human Professor Yana in order to escape the war. His use of the arch prevented the Doctor from sensing his existence. (DW: Utopia)

• Whilst not a Time Lord, Leela was a resident of the Capitol on Gallifrey, and it is known that she survived, at least for a small time, after the destruction of Gallifrey. (CC: The Catalyst)

• Again, while not a Time Lord, K-9 Mark I may have survived the destruction of Gallifrey before travelling through time to the year 2050 and "regenerating." (K9TV: K-9 TV series)

The Time Lords, on Gallifrey on the final day of the war. (DW: The End of Time)

• Numerous Time Lords attempted to survive the Time War by being connecting with the Master's brain and a Whitepoint Star diamond, allowing them to be pulled through the time lock along with Gallifrey itself. Thanks to the Doctor and the Master destroying the diamond that anchored them in the present, they were sucked back into the war and likely died with Gallifrey. (DW: The End of Time)

 

• The Dalek Emperor also survived. He had fallen through time to approximately the 2,000th century and set about re-building an army from the DNA of Humans. Destroyed by Rose Tyler with the power of the time-vortex. (DW: The Parting of the Ways)

• The Cult of Skaro and the Daleks imprisoned within the Genesis Ark escaped the attentions of the Bad Wolf, having left the universe for the Void before the end of the war. (DW: Doomsday)

• Though Davros was believed by the Doctor to have been killed in the war, Dalek Caan was able to temporal shift into the war and rescue him. He presumably died when the Crucible was destroyed. (DW: The Stolen Earth, Journey's End)

• A Dalek Saucer from Davros's invasion force survived the species's near extinction and found the last surviving Progenitor device; using a testimony from the Doctor, five new Paradigm Daleks were created, and used a Time corridor to escape and prepare a new Dalek Empire. (DW: Victory of the Daleks)